With improved lighting and shadowing from E2 you can expect this kind of problem to become a lot more obvious.
As an example, maybe you've decided that the inconsistencies with lighting from heavy use of 'double sided' texturing are tolerable versus the extra effort required to work out why some of the small parts on your model export inside-out and to fix them so they export properly. It is tempting to cut a few corners during asset creation. None of the lighting and shadowing will work properly without real three dimensional objects to work with, and any remaining two dimensional objects will be clearly shown up as two dimensional. Two dimensional mesh planes with pictures of three dimensional objects textured on will look a lot worse in E2 than they do in Trainz now. In particular, objects with good normal maps will benefit far more from improved lighting conditions than objects which do not have normal maps.
This provides four separate channels across two texture files - an RGB diffuse, a per-pixel environment reflection strength, a normal map, and a per-pixel specular highlight strength. If you don't need alphatransparency or masking, that will mean using the .m.tbumpenv material. In particular, note that optimising the lower LOD levels for reduced polycount is a lot more important for performance than optimising the polycount of the highest LODs. Look at the posts here for a good description of LOD and how to use it. While we have no E2 specific tools or techniques to discuss at the moment, there are things content creators can do when making content for current versions to get the most out of the backwards compatibility that E2 offers with current version content. I have been asked by several content creators recently about what they will need to do to make content for Trainz: A New Era and our new graphics engine, currently codenamed 'E2'.
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